


Vigil

by ProwlingThunder



Series: The Everlasting List of Shenanigans [9]
Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Big Brother Trieze, But Everybody Lives, Clones, Everybody Died, Gen, Kid Fic, Kid!Duo, Kid!Treize, Post-War, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 04:52:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1538309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt!Fill. Clonebaby-verse. Kid!fic.</p><p>Duo gets sick. That's okay; Treize is there to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vigil

**Author's Note:**

> In the Clonebaby-verse, all the pilots and Zechs were killed during a mission after the War. They, along with Treize, were later cloned and raised as siblings.
> 
> The prompt was "Siblings".

Treize and Zechs don't have so much time between themselves, and there is even less between their siblings, but Treize is still the oldest, and he knows it's his responsibility to look out for all his siblings, even when they're being pests.

 

Duo is five when he gets really sick, Treize is barely seven. Mother makes sure they are healthy, and sometimes, but rarely, a cold brings them down, or they catch a fever. Treize remembers when he was five, and he spent Christmas day bundled under blankets and barely lucid. But when Duo starts coughing it's not the sound of a cold, not really. It's a wet, racking sound, deep and shuddering, and Duo looks positively miserable.

 

You cough with a cold. Especially if it's in your lungs. But Duo's cheeks are flushed like a high fever, and those two don't go together.

 

Speckles of red stain his brother's fingers.

 

Mother is in one of the lower levels of the base they call home. There is a specially marked pathway, a very specific hall, that they are allowed to go down when they need her from way back there. Treize checks Duo's palm and feels his forehead with his cheek, and then he calls for Zechs to go fetch Mother; tell her to come quick, to Duo's room.

 

He flees.

 

The rest of his siblings loiter, but Treize can't. He doesn't know what's wrong, but he knows it's something. It's important.

 

Duo is tiny and slight, even more so than Quatre several months younger, but he's not small enough for Treize to carry him. He tries anyway, curls one arm around Duo and uses his free hand to drag one of Duo's over his shoulder, bending to make it easier for him. Duo's short. Treize doesn't care.

 

They stop often on the way to the bedrooms; Duo tires quickly, and he coughs a lot. But they make it.

 

Treize kicks at the door for the lower latch and it slides open. He's never been inside Duo's room before, which is odd because they all spend time everywhere. A pair of bunkbeds have been converted into a tent with a sliding cloth around the edges, and everything is done in black and red and blue, with stars painted on the ceiling and a bright, sickly-green carpet. The baby bed he had used when he was younger had been converted to a desk, and books and little action figures litter the room.

 

There's a huge poster of the Gundam Deathscythe on the wall.

 

Treize doesn't care about any of it. He draws the curtain open with one hand and sits Duo on the bedspread of bats and crosses, and then he lets him go to head to the attached bathroom.

 

He comes back with a cool cloth and uses it to clean the blood from the corners of Duo's mouth, from his palm and fingertips, and then he checks his forehead again.

 

His little brother lays down after that, fully dressed, and Treize huffs and starts undoing his shoelaces. Mother comes in when he's pulling off the second shoe and checks Duo's temperature herself, and then his pulse, and then she excuses herself. She comes back a few moments later with the huge red and white bag she hauls out whenever they get sick. Checks his eyes with a flashlight, with Duo grumbling the whole time, and then has him breathe into a machine, and then she checks his heartbeat with a stethoscope, and then she rolls up his sleeve and uses a square smelling like alcohol to clean a patch of skin.

 

Duo flinches away weakly when she opens the needle from it's packaging, but when she holds out her hand for his arm he gives it to her without protest. Treize lingers worriedly by the bedpost as she draws blood, and Zechs lingers at the door, and by now everyone else has come to see what's going on.

 

When Mother's done she has Treize get a pair of Duo's pajamas from the closet and starts stripping him out of his play clothes, and then she redresses him and tucks him into bed, and goes to get a clean, wet washcloth and a bucket. The bucket gets tucked next to the bed, and she shifts Duo to lay near the edge, and then the rag gets folded up and placed on his forehead.

 

Then she shoos them all out, except Treize because he's the eldest, and she asks him to watch his brother, and she's gone again.

 

She comes back regularly to check on them both, looking worried, her expression pinched. Her third trip she brings in an IV stand with a heartbeat monitor and hooks it all up to Duo's arm and chest. Treize knows somethings wrong; he always does, when she looks like that. When he asks, she only says he's sick.

 

But she brings them both dinner in Duo's room, and she comes in with another needle too, a syringe of something pale and off-colored. She talks Duo into waking up to eat a little, and then adds the needle of something into his IV line, and pets his hair.

 

After dinner all the kids pile up in Duo's room, and she reads them a story while they unfurl sleeping bags on their brother's floor, even little Wufei, the youngest at barely four. She doesn't leave until she's sure they're all asleep, but Treize isn't. He isn't. He can't sleep. He's worried.

 

“Will Duo be okay, Mother?”  
  
Mother checked the machines, first and brief, and then she leans down to check Duo's forehead again.

 

“...yes. He will be now. In a few more days.”

 

The next morning Mother is giving them all shots. Treize remembers Duo the day before, pale and coughing blood in his bed, hot with fever, and he's the first to offer Mother his arm.


End file.
